When Old Friendships Fade?

One of the more difficult aspects of life is the deterioration of long-time friendships. I (J) have a lot of friends that I’ve known a long time, some of whom go back to elementary school. In the last few years, a few of these friendships have been challenged by fundamental differences: how to treat people, reliability, common courtesy, jealousy, values, alcohol. In two cases in particular, I decided to break off the friendships. One guy got “faded to black” and I just didn’t even tell him I didn’t want to deal with him anymore; the other guy I told straight up that we couldn’t be homies anymore. He was shocked, but seemed to respect my opinion, perhaps aware that his own internal troubles were threatening his friendships. We didn’t speak for about a year, but we’ve since become somewhat cool again. I know several people going through the same things now. Check out this post a great blogger named Physician, Heal Thyself:

“This past holiday season brought with it a major challenge to my peace and well-being. To sum it up and be purposefully vague, one of the relationships in my life that I depend on most heavily for comfort and security was threatened by a clash in values. In hindsight, this conflict had been brewing for some time, but we were able to suppress our differences for the sake of a highly valued friendship for a long time. I think it was inevitable though that our outlooks would eventually cause us to collide, and it was no small collision. I think it had finally come down to a point where in order for us to both be honest with ourselves and one another, one or both of us had to say something that was unacceptable to the other.”

TheStateOf . . . Old Friends. I’m not the kind of guy who will let someone abuse my friendship, but I also value people that I’ve known a long time. What do you do when your old friends start trippin’?